Helping theCancer plan his lessons

[the Analogist]

Awhile back I was fixated on starting my own school...

anyway, the basic idea I had for structuring time was this: that each student would be assigned a block of time and the purpose of that block was project management.

Everything in the sciences and humanities is best taught as projects. What kind of projects? Form a sound and reasoned/researched opinion.

I think for the purpose of theCancer, something a bit like my high school physics teacher's routine. He would put the equations up on the board, take a few minutes to explain what they mean then pass out the homework. The whole rest of class we were free to work on whatever so long as we we'rent too rowdy and he was free to talk about whatever, but real homework questions took precedence.

For theCancer's sake, it seems a bit more complex because humanities courses appear less straight forward that physics, but really the goal of every humanities subject, and all philosophy in general, is to be able to reason effectively. any subject is useful for that purpose so long as the academics of it don't become the main focus.

I suggest for the topic of history, create a list of things that happened relevant to what the class is supposed to be about. make it fairly inclusive, then pass this list out to everybody. Take a few minutes to explain that "these are the things people think are important about this time and place. Your job is to come up with something that is on this list or not on this list and tell me why you find it interesting. Each person will have a turn to speak with me one-on-one or if a group of you are interested in the same topic i can speak with your group about it. what we will be doing is figuring out how best to explore these interests. our textbook is here to mostly narrate these events but there is a lot of stuff missing so we might refer to it, we might not. What direction any of your projects go is something we will be discussing in these one-on-one or group meetings. everybody can take the rest of class to think about what they want to study and if they want to work with anybody else on it."

all history is connected and intertwined so maybe nosy school administrators wont take issue with this approach...

You don't need to tell them a single freaking thing about how they will be expected to write an original essay for their final. what you will be doing as a teacher is using your experience to figure out how they can go about exploring various topics relevant to your subject. The struggles each individual student has will be for you to help overcome with whatever time you have.

I would suggest reading up more on the Jungian typology and make an inventory of the people you know. You may find it is easy to guess what personality type a person has with relatively little information. I've used it on a few of my coworkers. This information will be useful in terms of figuring out what aspect of the subject your student might be interested in and what strengths they will easily employ in its pursuit. I'm very much an INFJ, so a philosopher type much more inclined to the big ideas than the details. an ESTP would tell you all about the fascinating trees and their different types, i would be more likely to talk about the glacier that deposited the nutrients in the soil of that forest, or I would talk about the coolest tree.

this is really just for starters. I'm not out there in the field with these kids. But you need to remember that traditionally the word educate meant to draw forth. Like the sculpture in the stone awaiting the removal of the un-needed bits, your students already have opinions. don't forget too, school itself is a topic relevant to pretty much every subject. Your aversion to Gatto notwithstanding, do as he did with the haters of school and share some of the big ideas behind the creation and design of school. and don't dismiss Gatto because he IS a good source on that, but do your research.

[TheCancer]

Thanks. Thanks for taking the time to do that. I don't completely dismiss Gatto. I just have some criticism.